I do believe that thoughts create our reality. As David Bohm says, “Thought creates the world, and then hides and says it didn’t do it.” We look at that reality and think it’s just there, objectively, not that our thought created or could influence it. I’ve been observing  this for years, as a student of a spiritual teacher who taught very similar principles, as a student of the Dialogue method ingeniously developed by Bohm to help practioners become more aware of what thought is doing, and during doctral studies in depth psychology. It’s a habit of mine to observe thought and connect dots, like people watch sports or the weather, I watch this.

A  lot of teaching is going on now in various books and circles about how to manifest through thought. Great that people are learning more and more about this, but I get concerned about what is left out in much of the teaching. So much of thought is unconscious, most of it is. There is thought we inherit from ancestors that comes through family lines; thoughts that are gathered from experience that is often misinterpreted but from which conclusions are drawn and become our certainties without re-evaluation; thoughts that are created collectively which are very hard to sort out from our personal thinking. To change thought is a big job. It requires effort, energy, motivation, practice and help. I believe it requires practice with others, with those who are willing to catch us in unconscious thought, or in group effort such as spending time in intentional dialogue. Changing conscious thought is hard enough, changing what we are completely unaware of takes special attention.

Then of course probably the best medicine is “no thought.” As often as we can get to that place – to just feel, don’t think, that is probably when the most powerful shifts become possible.

I wish people would spend more time thinking together about thought, getting to the root of it. I got to teach about it in a college classroom in Los Angeles with rooms full of students from multiple countries and backgrounds. I miss that. Dialogue work takes committment, but can be as exhilarating, intoxicating, creative and astonishing as anything ever gets. To deeply change thought is to change everything.